Haven't written much on the ol' blog this summer.
It's a combination of being busy with other things (teaching a couple of courses, recording and editing episodes of Hallway Conversations, working on two ongoing research projects) and--I think--exhaustion from the last year and a quarter of incredibly demanding teaching.
It's not that the blogging has become unimportant or anything like that. I still value this kind of reflective writing about my practice, for sure. But other things have crowded in, and this writing has sort have felt less important given everything else in my life.
I struggle sometimes with setting unrealistic expectations for myself, so this has been an exercise in noticing my thoughts (as in, "I really ought to write something on the blog!") and then letting them pass by so I can focus on other things.
But...here I am, writing a short post, because..."Otherwise I will have a month go by with out a single post on the blog!" (As if that is so important? But in my mind it somehow is.)
I started this blog a little over nine years ago. It was when I started as a professor full-time, and I somehow thought people would care what I had to say about all kinds of things. That lasted about a year and a half, I think. :-) The first half-year, I had 60 posts. The second year, I had 127 posts. Somewhere in year 3 I realized that writing for myself (in general) here on the blog would be more valuable for me instead of trying to write for other audiences. And, since then, it's been a slow decline year by year, until last year when I posted a whole series of distance teaching tips, since that's in my wheelhouse, as they say. But this year...well, this is only post #12 for the whole year so far. That's not to say that I won't pick it back up in the fall and start writing more, because I just might.
But suffice to say I realize how I needed the break. And I am feeling okay about this pseudo-hiatus from blogging this summer, for the most part.
So here's to the end of July, and the beginning of August (tomorrow!) and the sudden rush to get everything ready for the new academic year to begin!
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| Yeah...not my feet...and not my photo, unfortunately. Thanks to Tabeajaichhalt on Pixabay for this one. |
